Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

The Monsters of TempletonGroff's much - praised debut is an inventive and original novel with a spunky heroine at its center. Archaeology student Willie Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, New York, to recuperate from a failed affair with a married professor. Willie always swore she'd never go back to Templeton, the idyllic community her ancestors established, but the town...

Cormac McCarthy's bleak vision of the end times

It's the ultimate pairing: Cormac McCarthy plus the apocalypse. As an author who has delivered some of the darkest moments in modern fiction via books like Blood Meridian and Child of God, McCarthy seems uniquely suited to an exploration of what the world might be like at its end. With The Road, he has developed this nightmarish scenario into an affecting and compassionate novel, as an...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

<B>Sukey's favorite</B> If you're looking for happy endings and even a touch of redemption, don't turn to Cormac McCarthy. But if you're looking for a well-crafted, well-paced, ominously dark, ominously plausible tale set on the bloodstained border between Mexico and Texas, McCarthy is your man. <B>No Country for Old Men</B> is McCarthy's first book in seven years and it...

McCarthy returns with another classic

Bringing a seven-year silence to an end, Cormac McCarthy has finally returned with a contemporary wild West tale that is his most accessible book to date. A novel that simmers with a who's-gonna-die-next type of tension, No Country for Old Men has a powder keg of a plot and reads like a breeze, yet it retains all the best elements of such McCarthy books as Blood Meridian and All the Pretty...

Cities of the Plain is eagerly awaited final novel in Cormac McCarthy's magnificent Border Trilogy. Like its brilliant predecessors, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, Cities of the Plain tells a riveting story that is simple in form but presses outward toward the archetypal and the infinite. The novel can surely be read on its own, but those who have read the earlier novels in the trilogy...